Last week brought us the indictment of six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, a city in which I once lived. The charges come after a series of mixed information from records and eyewitness accounts that have alternately supported and undermined the official story. Though the trial will become the formal medium for the weight of evidence, it seems that we have another high profile case of police misconduct to judge in the court of public opinion. Like some other incidents before it, the Freddie Gray case raises the question of whether surveillance may prevent some of the turmoil we've seen this month. At first it seems like an obvious choice. However, technology serves those who control it. The body cams and similar forms of monitoring are under the control of law enforcement and the citizenry.
Of course, there is no way it really could be under the control of anyone else. The cameras not only record the actions of police, but those of the people they engage. The privacy of the people involved needs to be protected. You're not going to see all police activity posted on You Tube for all to view like an episode of Cops. Fox gets release forms from the vast majority of the people it tapes and blurs out the people who didn't sign the paperwork. This isn't going to be the standard operating procedure for police departments when it comes to their own body cams. It's pretty sensible that most of the footage will not be released for public consumption.
Who will get to see it, then? When there is evidence of misconduct, there would be some process for attorneys to access the relevant data. This evidence has to be separate from the camera footage an sufficient to warrant requesting and obtaining this access. The cameras would serve to support a case of misconduct, not detect it. Then, once an attorney obtains the footage, one wonders what would govern how much they get. It has to be enough to investigate the case, but not so much it provides them coverage of things they shouldn't be seeing. How easy would it be to leave out those last few minutes that may change the context of the situation? The only people who would know the total content of the records would be those who create and control that content.
Perhaps more concerning is the potential for public surveillance. While the cameras watch the activity of the police, they are also watching the activity of every in proximity to the police. The Snowden case demonstrated that intelligence agencies had created sophisticated programs to analyze the providers of various Internet services. These agencies made the argument that because companies like Google were providing data to paying advertisers on individuals' web browsing habits, there was no reason the NSA couldn't join in too. If they give it up in the name of commerce, should the interests of national security be any less entitled? Police body cams may present a similar opportunity. Now we're not even talking about data in the hands of private companies. We're talking about data already on the servers of law enforcement.
Once we could argue that it's too much information to be useful in its aggregate form, but this is no longer the case. Spy agencies honed their skills searching for terrorist activities in phone conversations and Internet activity. The software and hardware necessary to search for incriminating evidence has vastly improved over the past decade. Police cameras present a huge new frontier for looking into the lives of individuals. We're not talking about public surveillance sources like the security cameras at shopping malls. For example, every time and officer responds to a domestic dispute, the camera captures the interior of a private residence. It sees what's on the walls, what books are on the shelves, what web page is up on the computer. None of this is related to the original reason the police responded. Indeed, the neighbors may have called the police because they mistook a movie you were watching for a violent argument. There was no danger to anyone. And yet , a snapshot of your private life is now stored somewhere. Could it be construed to indicate motives that aren't there?
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